> But inventing something totally different from what people know without any reason doesn't make any sense.

See this argument falls apart because:

It's a key-value store... I'm fairly certain people are aware of that concept, or can grok it fairly quickly once introduced to it.

Also as to "without any reason"? It handles js data natively. You're not having to immediately throw an ORM or a bunch of custom code to marshal data into and out of the db. People build more than just todo lists. There was also some intent of it being "low level" that others could build niceties like rich query syntax etc atop.

Now, that didn't really happen much, so the debate about it being "terrible" should maybe focus there on what got missed for that goal.